£500,000 for Sgt Pepper drum skin

The iconic bass drum skin used on the front cover of The Beatles’ 1967 album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band has sold for £541,250 at auction.

Auction house Christie’s had estimated that the hand-painted skin would sell for around £150,000, but it sold for almost four times that.

John Lennon’s hand-written lyrics for Give Peace A Chance also surpassed their top estimate of £300,000.

The hammer went down at £421,250.

The words were intended as a lyric sheet for Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1969 Bed-In for Peace at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, Canada, but Lennon gave them to fan Gail Renard and asked her to rewrite them in a larger format so everyone could join in.

A pair of Lennon’s tinted prescription sunglasses, which he wore for the cover of the Apple Records single Mind Games, sold for £39,650.

The Rock and Pop Memorabilia sale at the London auction house raised more than £1.5 million.

A rare recording of the Jimi Hendrix Experience performing at the Woburn Music Festival, at Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire, in July 1968 sold for £48,050. A 1966 Marshall amplifier used by Hendrix in concert between 1967 and 1969 sold for £25,000 and a pair his stripy flared trousers made £20,000.

A 1967 Gibson guitar which had been owned by The Who’s Pete Townshend sold for £32,450.

The sale included memorabilia from acts from Ella Fitzgerald to Madonna. Sale prices include buyer’s premium.